In Russia, where I was born during the Soviet war with Afghanistan, we were taught to unconditionally respect our returning veterans - regardless of whether we agreed ideologically with the reasons they had been sent to war. It's an axiom that has stuck with me ever since.

It's September, which in the world of high fashion heralds the start of spring! Yes, it's that time of the year when the industry's great and good embark on their whirlwind tour of the four fashion capitals, to witness first hand what designers have in store for us next season.

It's naive to think that much of what you read is particularly truthful, unbiased, based on legitimacy or even marginally informative but The Independent definitely used to be a place you could go to for actual news, well thought-out opinions and a sense of pride in reporting.

London Live is great - if you watch telly. And these days most of us... don't. If I'm representative of Mr Average Londoner, when I get home all I want to watch is escapist catch-ups of the blockbuster shows I'm continually missing. I swear one day there will be so much TV I need to catch up on that I'll never have time to see a current show.

While I'm no branding expert, when I think of the sort of man who would wear fur, I like to take a simplistic approach. I call it my 'macho' or 'metro' rule of thumb... and If beards can become a fashionable look after so many years consigned to the grooming waiting room, I have great hopes for fur fashion for men.

Usually the month of August is referred to as the silly season. The political exploitation of 14-year-old schoolgirl Hannah Smith's suicide by both tabloid and broadsheet newspapers suggests we might have to rechristen it the sinister season. Even for a press like ours, with its many well-known moral lapses, the shroud-waving over Hannah's death marks a new low.

From the reporting, you might have thought this was just a group of public-spirited barristers taking a break from their highly paid jobs to protect the justice system. Maybe they were. But I can't help noticing that legal aid pays the fees of lawyers. Thus, any cuts to the budget come directly from their capacious wallets.

My point is that we know lunatic radical preachers exist in the world. And unfortunately those with the lowest IQs and the least to lose will always be the most gullible and most easily influenced by those proclamations.

In fact it's always timely to be reminded of the fact that journalists are a vital pillar of any properly functioning democratic society. And this is notwithstanding the recent hammering that some parts of the profession have taken in this country over phone-hacking and other illegal activity. The fall-out from Leveson shouldn't distract us from the extremely serious work that journalists regularly do.

Why do those on benefits have to be caricatured or characterised in one way or another at all? There are thousands of decent, 'normal' people who are genuinely impoverished, and try to make ends meet as best they can

You may already have heard of this baffling, uninspiring collection of names compiled by Britain's most-unloved national newspaper, but just in case you're nodding off at the back with your copy of Heat magazine, let the paper itself fill in the gaps for you.

The debate around the fall of the print media industry has been raging for some time now. TV and radio threw the first punches and the internet went for the knockout blow. Closings and layoffs are now a regular occurrence and it is generally accepted that the news business has struggled to capitalise on the rise of digital.